July 24, 2006

The more the merrier....

Only children tend not to be very good at sharing and the folks over at the Optimum Population Trust don't want all those nasty brown people coming here.

Professor Philip Booth and I had an article about their ideas of "population control" in the Catholic Times. Read it on the IEA website.

Groups proposing policies of population control are once again making
the headlines. They suggest that the world needs a smaller population
to control its “environmental footprint”, to preserve natural resources
and to ensure that we can live in peace and relative comfort. These
ideas were once popular in the 1960s and 1970s. They are clearly
incompatible with Catholic teaching on sex and the family. However,
arguments in favour of an “optimum population” are also vacuous from an
economic perspective. It is important that the economic arguments are
understood. Particularly in Catholic schools, young people should not
simply be taught the received wisdom on environmental issues: young
Catholics should be encouraged to challenge the establishment view.

One of the more interesting things I found while researching this was an early book by Columbia University's Mahmood Mamdani from 1972 called "The Myth of Population Control". He writes:

Westerners have strong feelings about the value of personas and of human life not necessarily shared by Punjabi villagers. Some crusaders may feel that the pressures arising from growing numbers of people were self-evident. The villagers did not always hold that view.

“These Americans are the enemies of the smile on this child’s face", one said, "All they are interested in is war or family planning.”

His account would warm the heart of any libertarian, telling of how of the Punjabi people making their own decisions about family sizes. Contrary to the view of the higher-caste Indians and foreign experts, these were rational and fully sustainable in a rural economy with regular migration to the cities. The villagers simply let the government intervention, free contraceptives and lectures simply wash over them , often being kindly by lying to the government contraception advocates that they were using the devices provided.